Fear holds sway in KwaZulu's royal house: Prince tells of murder plot

ON Friday evening, 3 June, a Zulu prince received word that he was going to be killed. He was alarmed but not surprised. He had been identified as one of several members of the Zulu royal family responsible for the rift, revealed after the South African elections, between the irascible Inkatha leader, Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi and the Zulu king, Goodwill Zwelithini.

That weekend, the prince judged it wise not to spend the night at his home in Ulundi, until six weeks ago the capital of Chief Buthelezi's defunct one- party homeland, KwaZulu.

It was probably as well that he did. The prince's son spent the night keeping guard outside the house. Shortly after midnight he saw a car creeping towards the gate. Inside he saw a well-known Buthelezi loyalist, an Inkatha minister in KwaZulu-Natal's new provincial cabinet, and two other men.

The prince's son drove half a mile down the road, where he spotted two vehicles of the KwaZulu Police, also crawling towards his father's house. Such has been the litany of murders by the Kwazulu force in pursuit of Inkatha's political ends that it is now described by many Zulus as a Gestapo.

'When they saw that my son - though they didn't recognise him - had spotted their cars, they drove off,' the prince said. 'But I have no doubt they had come to kill me. That is the classic way these people do their murders: the car with the assassins in front and then the KZP behind, there for protection and so they can be first on the scene to cover up any evidence.'

The prince, speaking in a safe house in Durban, did not wish to reveal his name. It would be too dangerous, he said. 'Even now, in Ulundi, we only mention Buthelezi's name in whispers - even among friends. You never know who could hear you and what might happen. What is happening now, in a free South Africa, is that we members of the royal family are in more danger than ever before.'

Another Zulu prince, who has been in hiding since the beginning of the year and also had no desire to see his name in print, said that two weeks ago some KwaZulu policemen had come to his home and told his family that they would 'get him in the end'. Never too far from the minds of Zulu royalty is the case of Prince Petrus Zulu, a vocal critic of Chief Buthelezi, who was gunned down outside his Ulundi home in January. His widow is hiding in a Durban flat.

'I'd say nearly half of us in the royal family are in fear of our lives,' the prince said. 'If just one or two of us are killed, the repercussions for the whole province would be terrible. The war would start again, instability, the economy would suffer, investment won't come to South Africa - a big mess.'

Although Inkatha won the provincial elections in KwaZulu-Natal, and Chief Buthelezi is now Home Affairs Minister in the government of national unity, the problem is that he has only a fraction of the power he once held, and an even smaller fraction of the power to which he once aspired.

Five years ago, before Nelson Mandela's release from prison, the chief seriously thought he would be South Africa's first black president. He was bolstered in this belief by support from Western leaders, such as Margaret Thatcher, by the backing of Pretoria and by sinister supporters in Military Intelligence and the Security Police.

Now all these pillars have crumbled. What remained to him in the run-up to the April election was the KwaZulu Police (and its hit squads) and King Goodwill, whom he trotted out at public functions in order to portray himself as standard- bearer of Zulu nationalism.

'All along, Buthelezi has been using the king for his political ends - using him as his stick and his shield. Now Buthelezi is angry because the king is no longer dancing to his drumbeat,' the prince said.

Before the elections Chief Buthelezi controlled the king's funds and, in the shape of hand- picked KwaZulu policemen, his personal security. Now the South African army is providing him with an armed guard, and his funds come directly from central government.

'Buthelezi,' the prince said, 'wants to know why the king is meeting Mandela and not him. He wants to know what they are talking about. He wants to know who is writing the king's speeches now. He wants to know what the king is doing when he visits Johannesburg. He doesn't know and he is panicking.'

In a speech to his Inkatha followers last weekend, Chief Buthelezi claimed members of the royal family had succeeded 'step by step in making the king beholden to the ANC (African National Congress)'. He had heard 'rumblings' of discontent among ordinary Zulus, he said, against those princes who were scheming to insinuate the king into the ANC camp.

This, the prince said, was nonsense. All he and others were trying to do was place the king properly above politics. If anything, the prince was impatient and upset with the new government for its failure to rein in Chief Buthelezi.

How would this be done? Simple, the prince said. Remove the strongest pillar of Chief Buthelezi's power. 'You dissolve the KwaZulu Police. They have had instilled into them the idea of killing Inkatha's enemies as the natural course of duty. So what we must see is their integration into the South African Police, which the goverment has said it will do. Then the government must disperse the top brass - those who are completely loyal to Buthelezi - around the country. The big job to liberate the people truly is to remove the fear of Buthelezi from the people.'